There’s a mindset I keep seeing—in Buddhist sanghas, autism advocacy, establishment political discourse. I call it ‘cognitive centrism’—inhabiting a kind of middle ground, not because one felt their way there, but because they computed it. Like cognitive empathy: decode, then perform the answer. Here’s what it looks like:
Someone defending an argument gets confronted with some element of it that is clearly biased or harmful in some way: and instead of recognizing the bias, they average it away. “It’s just a tool, depends how it’s used.” “Complicated legacy.” “Incremental change.” Not malice—more like a reflex. It gets you to the neighborhood of fair, but it never actually results in justice.
Why it won’t move under pressure: it’s not holding an opinion, it’s holding a posture: suspension of judgment. “Don’t judge the tool—it’s just doing its job.” It’s a kind of adaptive compartmentalization, aka spiritual bypass. You can hand it more evidence of the tool’s bias forever, but evidence isn’t the input it’s built to take. “You don’t want to know how the sausage gets made” is the operative logic here.
The principle of charity—give the tool the benefit of the doubt in all cases—gets redeployed to make assessment of the tool unreachable. “It’s just a tool” doesn’t just interpret the DSM charitably. It moves the DSM one level up, to a place evidence can’t reach. Likewise, the teacher is not judged for their methods; the party is just gathering consensus. It’s the sincerity that makes its effectiveness as a thought-stopper durable. And dangerous.
Does this mean every accusation destabilizes the institution—that we accommodate every harm as if it delegitimizes the frame? No. It means the accusation gets the same weight the tool got by default. Currently, the tool is presumed innocent past evidence, and the accusation deemed exaggerated before it’s heard. That’s not two neutral positions—it’s asymmetry, running both ways. The fix isn’t reversing it. It’s judging each on its own merits, and refusing to punch down.
The corrective: redirect the benefit of the doubt—not to the tool, but to whoever the tool lands on.
In sangha: stop protecting the teacher’s legacy. Protect the student who was in the room. The lineage doesn’t need your benefit of the doubt—she does.
In diagnosis: stop defending the DSM’s neutrality. Defend the person it mislabeled. The manual isn’t hurt by scrutiny. The misdiagnosed patient is hurt by the denial of scrutiny.
In party politics: stop calling it consensus-building. Ask who consented, and who just got averaged in. The party isn’t harmed by the question. The constituent is telling you where harm landed.
Benefit of the doubt isn’t wrong—it’s just often aimed one level too high. Aim it down, and the people who need it are served.
We just accidentally corrected the mistake of trickle-down economics. Sit with that.
Okay, in that picture with the balls and the board, which part is the tool? Which part is the person trying to apply the tool? Which part is the misdiagnosed patient?
Ah, it landed as literal because it came right after “here’s what it looks like:” I always place the image after the first paragraph. Maybe the caption needs a disclaimer: “not literal”